


Beecharmer

by TheSubtextMachine



Series: Beecharmer 'verse [1]
Category: Lady Bird (2017)
Genre: Character Study, Closeted Character, F/F, Gen, Lots of Crying, Original Character(s), Prequel-ish?, This is what happens when I get in a writing mood during spring break, a lot of assertions of heterosexuality, i did not expect This to be as long as it turned out, in love with her best friend? Maybe so, some serious gay denial
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-04-06 06:23:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14050863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSubtextMachine/pseuds/TheSubtextMachine
Summary: A character study in which it takes Lady Bird about six years to figure out that she’s definitely a lesbian. It takes multiple crushes and a lot of denial, but she does get there at some point.Written after a conversation with hidingoutbackstage!





	Beecharmer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hidingoutbackstage](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hidingoutbackstage/gifts).



When Lady Bird gets her first crush on a girl, her teachers still bother to call her Christine and she’s playing Jean Paul Marat in a French Revolution simulation. 

The girl playing Marie Antoinette is new in town, coming all the way from sunny Florida. She has tanned skin and hair that’s long and sun bleached, and Lady Bird has a fascination with her that no one can really explain. Everything is awkward and stinking of the perfume that every seventh grader seems to wear, but the girl from Florida, who smells like oranges and corrects the teacher when she's called Katherine ("Call me Dana, I prefer it"), is like a breath of fresh air in the musty classrooms.

Lady Bird's fascination with Dana becomes something of a running gag during the simulation. Every time that she writes a report on Marie/Dana for her role, she demands to interview Dana in conversations that veer off topic so quickly that the teacher has to intervene.

The whole simulation lasts three days, and Dana gets killed by day two, but Lady Bird hangs around the "graveyard" section of the classroom.

The accusations of collusion from an enthusiastic Robespierre are worth it. 

-

The woes of seventh grade wreck Lady Bird as much as they do anyone else, and this is absolutely clear when Dana starts dating Kevin McAllister, who's in eighth grade and has ugly, greasy red hair. 

"Why the hell is she dating Kevin? He’s the worst guy in eighth grade! And yes, I’m counting Brett. Kevin is the fuckin' worst!" she says, shoving cafeteria fries into her mouth, not caring if the crumbs fall on her new shirt. That shirt could be totally ruined, for all she cared, because all that matters right now is that Dana is settling for _Kevin McAllister_ , and nothing about this is okay.

"Why do you even care? I mean, are you even friends?" asks Sydney, who absentmindedly plays with the note that that her mom wrote in her lunchbox.

"We totally are friends," lies Lady Bird, who catalogues every conversation the two have ever had to justify her anger.

"Since when?"

"We talked a lot during the French Revolution thing," she says, and she gets flashbacks to the scent of oranges and the flip of golden hair. It all gets torn apart by Kevin, because seventh grade sucks.

"Like that makes you friends," says Sydney, rolling her eyes to the back of her head as she takes a bite from the baby carrot she’s been ignoring.

"It totally does. And I’m totally justified in this. Kevin just doesn’t deserve her!"

"We get it, you’re in love with Dana. Let me eat my carrot in peace!"

And it’s not like Lady Bird doesn’t stay up late at night, imagining what it would feel like to wear Dana's cool denim jacket on cold winter nights, or anything, because she totally doesn’t. And wanting to hold hands is totally normal, especially with girls like Dana. And hell, if Lady Bird occasionally finds herself irrationally jealous of Dana's lip gloss, who could judge her? 

"Pshh, I’m not in love with Dana. Why would you even think that?"

"Because you stare at her during class like, all the time, and you hate her new boyfriend for no real reason?"

"Gross! I’m not a lesbian!" Lady Bird yells out, and it’s much too loud, but she’s too swept up in the dramatics of an accusation. 

"Calm down. I’m not calling you a lesbian, or anything. Just joking around. Lower your volume," says Sydney, looking around furtively as if they're discussing a major secret. 

Maybe they are, but Lady Bird was having none of it.

"I’m not a lesbian!" she shouts again, and Sydney lets her forehead drop to the table as people from surrounding tables giggle at the scene. 

Lady Bird looks around, and sees that Dana isn't even offering her a glance, she's too caught up in Kevin to care about anything else. She feels something burn, deep in her stomach, but she passes it off as bad cafeteria food and keeps eating.

-

Seventh grade ends and eighth grade begins, and things don’t change. Dana dates Kevin, and Lady Bird is absolutely not a lesbian under any circumstances whatsoever. Sometimes, Lady Bird pulls out her seventh grade yearbook and reads the note that Dana wrote her in dark blue pen. She runs her thumb over the "You were an EPIC Jean Paul Marat, keep being awesome over the summer! Can’t wait to get to know you better next year!" and feels yearning radiate from her fingertips. 

She just wants to be friends with Dana, best friends. Wants to watch movies and cuddle and have late night walks, like friends do. 

Lady Bird wants to wear that denim jacket, but in a Friend way.

It doesn’t matter, Dana probably does those things with _Kevin_.

Things don’t change.

-

Eighth grade graduation hits Lady Bird like a freight train, and she doesn’t even have time to fully comprehend it before she’s crying into Dana Garvin's shoulder and everything is all the sudden much too cramped. Mascara runs hot down her face, and Dana clutches her. Lady Bird can feel the shaking around her, and realizes that Dana must be crying too. She pulls away, and begins talking without thinking.

"Oh my god Dana you don’t have to cry! You’re so pretty and you smell really good and I’m so so sorry, I always wanted to be your friend! And I hated Kevin so so much and-" Lady Bird gets taken over by sobs, and she dives back into the warm comfort of Dana's shoulder. She's unable to speak, so Dana does the job for her.

"Oh my god, same! You always seemed so cool and so confident and I love your hair so much! You smell really good too!" exclaims Dana, and she’s touching Lady Bird's hair, and she gets the sudden urge to kiss of of the tears off her face. She can’t, because they’re surrounded by other crying eighth graders waiting to go on the graduation stage, and she’s definitely not gay.

"It’s just soap! I just smell like soap!" she bursts out, and it’s loud and bombastic, but that’s okay because Dana is crying and laughing at the same time, pulling her into a tight hug.

"Well it must be some awesome soap!" Dana says, and Lady Bird's urge to kiss her doesn’t go away, it only increases.

"God, and your jacket! That denim jacket was so cool! The pins and those patches! I love it so much!" says Lady Bird, instead of kissing her. Dana pulls away suddenly, and keeps both hands on her shoulders as she looks into her blue, blue eyes.

"Do you want it?" she asks, fire ablaze in her eyes despite the tears still rolling down her cheeks, leaving tracks of cheap drugstore mascara and the occasional shimmer of gold eyeshadow.

"What?" Lady Bird asks, and she feels things shift into hyper focus as she makes some of the most intense eye contact of her life.

"Do you want my jacket? I’m probably not going to wear it in high school, and you seem to love it. Do you want it?" Dana asks, and Lady Bird thinks she might faint. 

"Yes," she answers, and she’s sure that if there wasn’t a blush on her face there is definitely one there now. Dana darts away to pull the jacket out of her backpack, and shoved it into Lady Bird's arms before quickly diving into a hug.

"You'll call me, right?" whispers Dana, and people are starting to move towards the door, ready for the ceremony.

"Absolutely," says Lady Bird, clutching the jacket as they move into the line, remembering the phone number written in the eighth grade yearbook.

-

It’s scorching hot outside that summer, but Lady Bird wears the jacket everyday without fail. She calls the number that Dana wrote in her yearbook, but it’s a dead end line. The phone book isn’t helpful, either. 

Her mom says that the Garvins moved to Montana, and that no one knows their number or their address. Lady Bird holds back tears, but still wears the jacket.

-

Freshman year of high school arrives with a uniform and Julie, who sits next to Lady Bird in homeroom and hums jazz tunes with a clear, deliberate voice. Julie doodles flowers on the margins of her looseleaf paper, and gives Lady Bird sympathetic eyes whenever a nun makes her take off her denim jacket, which has gotten even more worn down after the summer. The "Florida" patch is on the verge of falling off, but she can never bring herself to part with it.

Catholic high school doesn’t ever dim Lady Bird's light, but it definitely wears on her patience. She becomes the official enemy of the debate team after breaking one of their mics after yelling too loud into it and promptly throwing it on the floor. She also gets banned by chess club for flipping the chess board in a fit of nerd-induced rage. 

The list of places from which she's banned lengthens throughout her freshman year, but it comes to a standstill during spring, when she starts spending her lunches and afternoons with Julie. 

Julie is inexplicably calm, and that force radiates into Lady Bird, biting through her constant agitation. She always feels something crawling beneath her skin, some kind of itch that gets worse whenever she lets her thumb run over the hem of her jacket or when she stares at the creamy ceiling of her bedroom, thinking about her future. She thinks of a pretty boy and a kid or two, but it always seems wrong.

It's just teen angst, she guesses. Just a symptom of the life she leads. 

It still sucks, she thinks as she shifts around in her bed, staring at the ceiling and coming up with a future outside of Sacramento.

-

The theology class is hell for her, especially the day when they bring up the Homosexual Lifestyle, as the teacher calls it. 

Lady Bird feels a burn deep in her stomach, and her mouth tastes weirdly metallic as the nun delicately dances around her arguments, stating that they are immoral because marriage is for babies, and babies cannot come from gay marriage. Lady Bird tunes out when Sodom and Gomorrah is brought up, at which point she puts her hands over her face to hide her burning cheeks.

In the back of her mind, she knows that this is a weird reaction for a totally straight person to have, but she supposes that it’s because she knows about her mom's gay friends.

She is not a lesbian, no matter what Riley Ortiz says. Just because Riley sat next to Lady Bird during this whole debacle does not mean that she somehow knows more about it than anyone else. 

The gossip mill turns, and Lady Bird's possible lesbianism is a hot topic for a solid week among the freshmen, but it’s quickly taken over by the news of Samantha and Mike getting caught kissing during gym. Lady Bird is glad for the diversion, if only because the nuns stop giving her concerned glances when they think she isn’t looking. 

-

Sophomore year hits with another unit on the French Revolution, and Lady Bird tries again to find Dana. The denim jacket suffers an awful tear, and is retired to stay on her bookshelf, bundled up near her middle school yearbooks. 

There isn’t a simulation, but hearing lectures about France reminds Lady Bird of mornings spent in the corner of a cluttered classroom, sharing sticks of gum. She asks her mom about their Montana address, and finally finds it. She steals a slip of looseleaf paper from Julie, and writes an awkward letter in purple pen that she bought on sale.

It talks about the French Revolution, Riley Ortiz's reign of terror, and nuns. She packages it in an envelope decorated with stickers and swirls, and sends it off to Montana.

It doesn’t get a response, and the sun shines a bit less bright in Sacramento.

-

Time passes slowly, whether it be the slow turn of the winter months or the long, long seconds that tick by on the clock during every class. Lady Bird learns how to stare at the hair of the girl who sits in front of her, and while she knows that it may _sound_ like something a repressed lesbian would do, she’s not a lesbian so therefore it is a completely heterosexual activity.

Straight hair with flyaways, a mass of curly hair, carefully maintained waves. She knows them all. She always wants to reach out, wants to feel the hair, the way that Dana reached out to touch her hair on graduation. She never does, but it’s something that invades her mind and grows, like some kind of virus. 

Her teachers make fun of her for spacing out during class, but no one ever brings up what she's staring at.

Jan Bukowski's soft-looking, copper hair might be the reason that she dyes her hair red the second summer begins, but she doesn’t talk about it to anyone.

-

Her mom does flip out a bit when she comes back from a sleepover with Julie rocking fire truck red hair, and her hair is definitely wrecked from the bleach, but it’s worth it.

It’s especially worth it when the girl from the sunglasses kiosk at the mall closest to Sacramento compliments it, and it’s not because Lady Bird likes Sunglasses Girl (even if her stomach flutters a bit when she puts on heart shaped sunglasses and winks at the mirror), it's because Sunglasses Girl is objectively pretty, and compliments from pretty people are especially precious.

Julie and Lady Bird have to re-dye it every couple of weeks, and Lady Bird learns to treasure the hours spent in the Julie's slightly grimy bathroom. The sink is stained red, as are most of the white towels in the house, but the conversations that spring up while Julie is painting her hair red are worth it.

By some trick of magic, Lady Bird finds herself in a state of peace while Julie works her hair dye magic. Peace is hard to come by in Sacramento, there is only silent agitation and shouting heard from another room. But in Julie's bathroom, spending summer afternoons cooped up in a tiny room while the tiny radio plays Julie's mom's music, Lady Bird manages to find peace.

Julie talks about anything and everything while she works on Lady Bird's hair, from her dream house (two stories, a balcony, a nice kitchen) to her dream husband (tall, kind, doesn’t make sexist jokes), to her dreams at night (flying, naked at school, and being abandoned at an amusement park). 

Lady Bird can’t relate to any of it. She can never imagine being in one place for long enough to settle down in a dream house, and something about the idea of getting married to someone named Tom makes her uncomfortable. She can never remember her dreams, either. They all float away from her to fast to catch, like fluttering butterflies that evade capture.

Julie talks despite it all, and it lures Lady Bird into a sense of peace, somehow. Julie, forever soft and kind, is normal despite everything. Julie wants a house and a husband and dreams of flight, and it calms Lady Bird down, that she can know normalcy without being forced to participate.

Lady Bird can’t fathom normalcy, if she’s being honest. Her future has always been as flighty as her dreams, but she knows that normalcy will have nothing to do with it.

Still, she takes comfort in the knowledge that Julie will be normal and happy, even if Lady Bird may never be either. 

-

The nuns hate her hair as much as her mom did, but Jan Bukowski gives her a high-five on the first day of school, so mission accomplished. Jan had cut her hair into a nice bob, so Lady Bird gladly returns the gesture. Riley Ortiz calls them lesbians, but it doesn’t matter too much. Julie's mom officially bans Lady Bird from using their bathroom for hair dye, so she’s resigned to DIY hair work.

Lady Bird finally starts insisting that her teachers use the proper name, instead of just her friends. 

The nuns hate that too, but the opinions of nuns haven’t swayed her before, and this is no different. 

-

Said nuns end up sending a letter to her mother about their "concerns", and it definitely wrecks Lady Bird's Halloween festivities (ie, having a sleepover with Julie and gossiping about Riley Ortiz's brother's new girlfriend). Her mother turns off the porch lights, locks the door, and sits Lady Bird down in the living room for a "chat". 

She pulls out a piece of creamy-colored cardstock and hands it to Lady Bird, who's stomach drops the second she sees the school insignia. She doesn’t even read a word before her head darts up to her mother.

"Have I been expelled?" she asks, mind racing with all the possibilities.

"No. Read it."

By the buttery glow of lamplight, she speed-reads through phrases about rebellion and concerning behaviors and possible lesbianism, and the metallic taste is back in her mouth. It’s the same feeling of that one theology lesson, or when Sydney accused her in seventh grade.

"I’m not a lesbian, mom," she says, definitively and angrily. Sure, she stares at the heads of the girls in front of her, and she might want to kiss Jan sometimes, but all girls feel that.

"That’s not what I’m worried about. If you were a lesbian, we could have that discussion, but you are also being disruptive. You broke a mic?"

"Psh, That was freshman year, I have no idea why they’re bringing it up now."

At this, her Mom buries her head in her hands, and Lady Bird becomes hyperaware of the couch beneath her and the whirring ceiling fan above her. Everything is starkly silent, and it is clear to her how much of a disappointment she will always be.

"I have been patient, I don’t know what else I have to do. Help me help you, Christine."

"Lady Bird."

Her mom sighs deeply, and it somehow manages to suck all of the air out of the room. Lady Bird returns to the buzzing sound of the fan above her, and the light chatter of kids walking down the street.

"I'm sitting you down right now, because I want you to talk to me. This letter says a lot of things that I didn’t know, things I didn’t know about my own daughter. I need you to talk to me," her voice is so exasperated that Lady Bird can’t help but look her in the eyes, and realizes that her mom can feel it too. The invisible veil that hangs between them, sewn with fabric of omissions and heavy silences, seems impenetrable in this moment.

"I love you, mom," Lady Bird says, wanting to crumble under the weight of everything she’s holding, whether it be the thing under her skin or the yearning for something undefinable. 

"I love you too, but I don’t understand you," her mom says as she reaches out to touch her arm, and something about the gesture makes Lady Bird dive in for a proper hug.

She holds on tight, holding back tears. Her mom hugs back, and things are okay for a minute. 

-

After Halloween, Lady Bird takes a hiatus on her teenage rebellion. She doesn’t touch up her dyed red hair, she doesn’t break sound equipment, and she sticks to Julie. 

Julie teaches her how to do basic sewing and stitching, so she fixes up the denim jacket that doesn’t fit her anymore. It’s a sentimental action, and Lady Bird doesn’t know what she’s sentimental for, but it makes her smile when she folds up the repaired jacket. It has a sacred spot in her top drawer, and it still miraculously smells a bit like oranges.

-

After an uneventful Thanksgiving, Lady Bird finds herself breaking her hiatus on teenage rebellion when Dylan Cable invites her to his Christmas Party. He invites the entire grade, so his house is appropriately stuffed when the party rolls around. 

His parents are going on a retreat, so there are no chaperones to stop the teenage craziness that starts the second that his radio starts playing Christmas hits. Lady Bird finds herself alone at first, since Julie's Mom refused to let her go the second she heard the phrase "party at Dylan Cable's House". Somehow, her issues lied not with the party part, but the Cable family. Apparently Dylan was the one who teepeed Julie's house last spring, and the Cables refused to apologize and admit guilt.

This leaves Lady Bird alone, drifting through the grinding teenagers while holding a red solo cup of weak beer in her hands. She feels like a ghost, like a passenger in a world she couldn’t participate in. This feeling of a veil between her and the rest of the world overtakes her, but it shatters before her eyes when she feels a hand on her shoulder.

Her head whips around, her beer sloshes a bit, and she realizes that Jan Bukowski must be an angel and that she must’ve done something good to be saved by her.

Jan says something, but her hand is still on Lady Bird's shoulder and the chatter around her is deafening, so she only sees her lips move. She has bright red lipstick on, and it clashes a bit with her hair, but Lady Bird still feels the overwhelming urge to kiss her.

Instead of that, she moves her gaze from her lips to her eyes, which are looking softly back. There’s a wide, tipsy smile on her face and she keeps speaking. That’s when Lady Bird actually tunes in to her words.

"-ance with me! It’s Jingle Bell Rock, you gotta!"

Next thing Lady Bird knows, she’s downed her beer, thrown the cup in the trash, and is jumping to music while holding hands with Jan. Her shoes had been flung off sometime in this flurry, since she can feel the scratch of carpet under her socked feet, and the song isn’t even Jingle Bell Rock anymore so god knows how long this has been going on, but she’s having so much fun that she lets herself be spun in circles.

There’s a crash in the next room, and an ensuing shout from Dylan, but the music is still playing so nothing else matters but the music and Jan as she sings along. 

Everything passes in an adrenaline rush, and next thing she knows, she opens her eyes to the pastel blue colors of the Cable's kids bathroom, and Jan is using safety scissors to cut Lady Bird's hair into something that is apparently fashionable in New York. They both giggle at the faded red chunks of hair that scatter across the counter and the floor, and sing along softly to the strains of Christmas music coming through the door. 

Dimly, Lady Bird decides that this is heaven and that Jan Bukowski just happens to be an angel. 

The veil of separation is removed, replaced instead by a rosy, shimmery tint, the way that sunglasses change the view but refuse to obscure it. It’s nice, to feel one with something, to feel one with an angel. 

She tells Jan this at some point, she whispers it out like a silent prayer. Jan just laughs a bit, and keeps snipping. There’s a shout of "spin the bottle" from the other side of the door, so Jan pulls Lady Bird out of the bathroom with half-finished hair so she can play.

Things move quickly, and she’s shoved into a cramped circle with sweaty, drunk teenagers, and it suddenly feels a lot less like heaven. It feels like church, with all of the unfounded anxiety and incomprehensible noises and awful-tasting wine.

Jan gets pulled to a different part of the circle, so Lady Bird is suddenly stuck between a kid from her Biology class and a complete stranger. In other words, just like church. She gets this silly urge to cry, and she touches the part of her hair that still touches her shoulders, and then the part that hits her chin. This only makes her sadder.

The empty beer bottle at the center is spun by a suspiciously blushy Dylan, and it lands on Riley, of all people. They kiss, and Riley spins. She lands on a sophomore, who kisses her and then spins. The bottle glints in the light, and the turning and rotations of it are somehow mesmerizing. Lady Bird's eyes catch on it, and watch it circle endlessly for turns upon turns, until it finally lands on her. She looks up, and sees the boy she’s about to kiss.

He’s across the circle from her, and she remembers seeing him a few times in the hall. He’s not horrendous or anything, but she can’t drum up any excitement or feeling, he moves to the center of the circle, and she follows. She vaguely remembers that this is her first kiss when she leans in, and he leans in too.

It’s not _bad_ , she thinks. It’s not anything at all. His slight stubble scratches unpleasantly against her cheek, and his lips feel weirdly wet. It’s not anything to write home about, so they separate quickly and shuffle back to their spots. Everyone stares at her, and her stomach drops as she realizes that it’s her turn to spin.

The possibilities frighten her, but she swallows them down as she reaches for the smooth glass body of the bottle, and with a sharp twist, her fate is up to air resistance and god.

It spins and spins and spins, and she feels herself going a bit dizzy as her eyes watch it slow down to a stop. She lets her gaze trail up towards the direction the bottle points, and finds herself looking right into the dark brown eyes of Jan Bukowski.

Her stomach drops, and her heart rate quickens. Jan, angel on earth, is slowly moving towards the center, and Lady Bird drifts like a ghost to meet her there.

Everything feels like it’s happening in high definition. The whispers of the voices around her suddenly become much louder, she can feel the slight tang of cheap beer on her tongue. Everything is clear, especially the lipstick on Jan's lips. She can feel adrenaline in her bloodstream as she leans in, and the kiss feels a lot less like nothing. If she wasn’t in such deep denial, she’d call it everything.

Her heart is thumping, providing a steady, pulsing beat while Lady Bird reaches her hand to the hair she’d been staring at for so long. Everything is warm, and she can’t tell if it’s the heat rising up in her blushing cheeks, or something from Jan. Jan puts her hand on Lady Bird's jaw, and suddenly it’s over.

There’s cheering, laughing, and static in the background as they separate, and Lady Bird feels like she’s sees Jan more clearly and truly in this moment. She’s hyper focused on the freckles that dust her nose, on the slight furrow of her dark eyebrows. 

Reality is still far away as they both crawl to their respective spaces, and Jan spins the bottle herself.

It lands on Kevin McCallister, of all people, and Lady Bird wonders what peace feels like.

-

Lady Bird creeps into her house, still thinking about rosy tints and red lipstick. She steps as lightly as she can, and she left her shoes at Dylan's House, so she thinks that she’s silent. 

It’s only when she walks into the living room that she knows the jig is up: her mom is sitting expectantly on the couch with the lights on, sipping wine as she goes through a catalogue. Her head slowly lifts to see Lady Bird in all of her glory. Lady Bird has a sort of out of body experience, she sees herself the way that her mom must obviously see her now.

She has no shoes, only one sock and a bare foot caked with mud from the front lawns she had to walk through. Half of her hair is chin length, the other touches her shoulders. She stinks of teenage rebellion, beer and the slightest hint of secondhand weed that ran out before she could touch it. Her eyes are tired, despite the makeup she put on them, and even the makeup is smudged beyond repair.

"Did you really think that putting pillows under your covers would fool me?"

Silence fills the room, and Lady Bird is struck with the absurd urge to cry.

"What the fuck happened to you?" 

The question hangs in the air, and her eyes well up with tears. She feels broken, like something is wrong with her but she’ll never know what it is.

"I’m so sorry, Mom," she says, and tears leak from her eyes, and she’s furiously rubbing at her face to make them stop, but they just won’t. She goes to sit on the couch, and leans into her mom's shoulder.

"We're going to fix your hair tomorrow. After that, you are grounded. Understand?" she says, striking a tone halfway between tired and understanding. It’s familiar to Lady Bird, and she can only respond with sobs and a nod.

"We'll talk about this. Just go to bed, okay?"

Lady Bird nods once again against her shoulder, and gets up, swiping furiously at the tears that keep coming. Her mom stops her to give her a fierce hug, and then Lady Bird is free to stagger to her room, still making a fuss with her tears and stomps along the way.

-

When school starts up again after winter break, Lady Bird is in a special brand of hell: she’s been grounded within an inch of her life, and everything is too bright and too cold for her to feel anything other than uncomfortable. Her hair was cut by her mom the next morning, so the lesbian rumors are circling around again.

Not only did she kiss a girl, but she also had short hair. The kids go wild.

They go wild enough that Jan has to approach her during lunch, holding her full lunch tray as if it were a protective barrier.

"Hey, uh, Christine-"

"Lady Bird. And what’s up, Jan?" she says with an uneasy smile. Jan looks like she means business, and dread builds up on Lady Bird's throat.

"We haven’t talked since the party, and I just want to make sure that you don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not, like, a lesbian."

"Neither am I."

Jan winces, but she keeps going, even though Lady Bird retreats behind her veil of isolation and the steel in her eyes.

"Well, just in case you are, I’m not. I just don’t want you to get the wrong idea, you know? You seemed kinda intense, and after people started talking..."

Lady Bird forces an eye roll, and crosses her arms in front of her. All her walls go up.

"I’m always intense. Don’t think you’re special, just because we talked," Lady Bird says, and she punctuates it with a turn on her heel and a strut to the table she shares with Julie. Her face is stone, but beneath she feels like the fires of hell are licking at her insides. She decides that angels are just liars who cut your hair, kiss you, and then treat you like you have the plague. Fuck angels, fuck their "saving". Who needs peace when they have the hell of Sacramento, she thinks bitterly.

-

The rest of her school year goes by with a metallic taste in her mouth, and she goes through life with two middle fingers up. She saves her softness for Julie, and their moments at her house. 

She still feels the yearning, feels the itch beneath her skin. She doesn’t fix it, she just learns to live with it.

-

The time before she is able to leave Sacramento passes weirdly, in long stretches with quick interludes. Her time spent swimming in the public pool feels like it lasts a month, but it feels like only a day has passed and she’s left with a cast on her arm and responsibilities for the future.

She talks about the future with Julie a bit, and her own is as murky as ever, but Julie only gets clearer as the days go on. She found the address of her dream house, the dress she'll wear to prom, and the church she'll get married in.

Lady Bird discovers that she wants all of this for Julie, almost as much as she wants peace. She wants Julie to wake up late on Sunday mornings and to step out on the balcony of her dream house. She also finds that she kind of wants to do these things with Julie. She wants to bake blueberry pancakes and give them to their their kids and to dance to Frank Sinatra in the living room.

She’s not a lesbian or anything, but she can imagine a life with Julie.

It doesn’t matter anyway, a bird could never be tied down, and Lady Bird is no exception, she'll either run or ruin it with her insanity. 

It’s still a nice daydream.

-

When Lady Bird first sees Danny, he’s singing a showtune that she barely recognizes and she decides that he would be a great first boyfriend. Just from what she can see from across the auditorium, he seems unfailingly earnest and kind of cute, in a weird way.

She feels an urge to see what his room looks like, to have an early morning coffee with him. Naturally, she leans into this urge will all of the effort she’s capable of.

Even if her brother scoffs when she states that she has a boyfriend, it’s worth it. The rumors stop, and they have great conversations over the phone. The kisses are underwhelming, but Lady Bird finds that on a certain, impossible level, she _gets_ Danny. 

He always walks around oddly, as if he’s being restrained in a subtle, small way. Sometimes, there are moments when she can see the spell melt from his eyes, and more than anything, Lady Bird wants to be friends with him. She gets the sense that he knows what it’s like to have a veil rest on front of his eyes, in front of his interactions.

As absurd as it probably sounds, Lady Bird thinks that Danny might get her too, for the same reason. He's the first one to reach for her hand when Jan kisses her new boyfriend in the cafeteria. He's the one who smiles when Lady Bird shows him the jacket that still sits on her shelf.

They don’t ever talk about it, but they both get it, and that’s enough.

-

It’s a series of awesome parties and even better performances before Lady Bird sees Danny in the bathroom stall, and it feels like betrayal more than anything else.

Lady Bird has kissed a girl before, it’s not that she’s homophobic. It’s just that she and Danny had a silent pact. They understood each other, and Danny had to go mess it up by doing that. 

It makes her so unbelievably angry, leaves her so hopeless. Who does she have now? Julie, who doesn’t understand? Her mom, who hates her? 

She's less outraged as a girlfriend, which is the weird part to her. It’s not that he kissed someone else, it’s that he broke this silent promise to ride this relationship out until they would have to leave Sacramento. Danny, at some point in this mess, became a friend. 

Lady Bird doesn’t really know what sacred pact he broke. All she knows is that it was implied in the "respect" and the friendship, and she may be more confused than Danny as to what is even going on.

She cries nonetheless, and lets Julie hold her hand. It’s enough.

-

She wouldn’t be Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson if she didn’t manage to get a job, ruin the best friendship she had, and vandalize a teacher's car in a short span of time.

Something about Danny makes her want to assert herself, to assert her anger. Kyle from the coffee shop looks like the kind of guy you’d find on girl's bedroom walls, so she flirts with him. Jenna is the kind of friend someone who goes to homecoming would befriend, so she lies about her address and leans into a friendship.

It makes her head hurt and her eyes spin as she stares at her ceiling, but it’s better than silent pacts and softness. I do not need to be saved, she thinks, over and over like a broken record. Somewhere, there’s a part of her heart that’s still yearning for something else.

-

Danny approaches her, one day at the coffee shop. Before Lady Bird can remember to be angry, they’re locked in a tight embrace while he cries into the shoulder of her uniform.

She decides that anger isn’t what either of them need right now, so she hugs tight and ignores the way that she gets it, and the way that Danny gets her in the same way. 

-

Lady Bird loses her virginity to Kyle, and she’s not mad because the act itself wasn’t particularly enjoyable. She didn’t like kissing Danny all that much, and the end of their relationship was pretty catastrophic, but he was still the perfect first boyfriend. Kyle would’ve been the perfect first time if he was a virgin too, and for a second, Lady Bird wonders if she hates him for it.

He ruined a story she could’ve told by being a dick, and Lady Bird doesn’t doubt for a second that he definitely told her that he was a virgin too.

She still plans to go to prom with him, even if she hates him a bit. He does, after all, look like the kind of guy a girl could fall in love with. That girl isn't Lady Bird, but it’s the kind of girl she wants to be.

-

Prom arrives, and when Kyle and Julie skip out for some concert, Lady Bird gives up.

She’s not that girl, she decides as she puts on a thrift store dress that she secretly loves. She doesn’t need to be saved, especially by those assholes. There’s a joy that comes with saying "fuck it and fuck them", a joy that’s more lighthearted than her divorce from Julie and Danny. 

She lets her palm run over the sequins, over the lace, and if for only a moment, she sees a future. Marriage, kids, telling stories. It makes her smile, and she feels tears well up in her eyes, but she stops them with as much force as she can. Struck with nostalgia, she touches the denim jacket that still rests on her shelf, after all this time. 

The action gives her enough strength to leave the house and go to prom without fear or anger.

The moment she steps into the gymnasium, and looks around at the elegant dresses and the judgmental nuns, she gets a rush of love for Sacramento. It’s as if she has the rosy tint from the Christmas party, back in her vision. She lets her eyes scan the auditorium, and smiles broadly when she sees Julie.

Julie is pouring herself a glass of punch, and Lady Bird's vision zeroes in on her as she steps across the crowds. She feels like she’s in a movie, like she’s Prince Charming rushing through the ball to get his princess. She moves faster, now with the heroic tilt of someone who’s in love, and nearly crashes into Julie.

(Of course, she’s not in love with Julie or anything, just a solid platonic love. It’s like if the prince was best friends with the princess, and wanted to grow old with her, but messed things up, and just wanted to be friends with her again. That’s exactly how it is.)

Julie is in a dress befitting a true princess, and Lady Bird swoons a bit as she hurriedly tries to make her awkward amends. The moment rushes over in her head, and she feels like her mind just caught up with reality when Julie gives her a hug and an apology.

Lady Bird is sure that she’s smiling like an absolute idiot for hours afterwards, dancing her heart out and taking prom photos with her, and she finds that there is a comfort in acting like a couple. They dance the slow dance, holding each other so tight that there is no beginning or end, only them and "I Will Always Love You" blaring through the speakers.

Absentmindedly, Lady Bird hopes that her own wedding dance is just like this. The thought catches in her mind, and she tries to replace Julie with a boy, but anything else just feels wrong to her.

Prom night is not a night for dwelling, so she ignores it.

Later, when they take their shoes off because they’re so tired from dancing and they’re lounging on Lady Bird's couch, dresses ruffled and makeup streaked from sweat, Julie starts crying. 

Every cell in Lady Bird's body seems to react, because there is no just world in which Julie ever has to cry. She asks why, and Julie answers something about not being built to be happy, and Lady Bird _knows_ how that feels. She knows the long nights, the veil, the things crawling beneath her skin. She knows what it’s like to know that she'll never find peace, but reaching for it anyway. She’s shocked still, and pulls Julie in for what must’ve been the hundredth hug of the night. 

Julie cries into her shoulder, and Lady Bird knows what this feels like, too. She knows what it’s like to have Danny sobbing into her uniform, knows what it’s like to bury her emotions in her mom's shoulder. 

Everything hurts, all of the sudden. She feels on the edge, like there’s so much inside her that no showtune could get out. 

Lady Bird won’t know peace, she realizes, but she does know silence, and that’s all she can give in moments like these.

-

After that, Lady Bird gets into a New York School and time begins to pass so fast that she can barely keep up.

Her mom gives her the silent treatment, she turns eighteen, summer zips by. It almost doesn’t seem real, like she’s watching a tape of her life instead of living it. 

Before she can even comprehend it, she’s on a plane that her mom didn’t watch her get on, and she watches her life become a speck on the landscape of California. She soars over the US, until she watches the plane glide over New York.

She can’t decide how she feels about it.

-

Three months later, she’s taking one of her Lady Bird Patented Hangover Walks, kicking up dead leaves on the sidewalks as she tries to fix her headache with some fresh air. It’s become her Sunday morning tradition, whether or not she was drunk the night before. 

There’s a calm to a Sunday morning, despite the bustling city around her. She lets her mind ramble and run over things, giving herself time to think without the distractions of college life.

She read somewhere that Albert Einstein came up with his trademark theory while on a brisk walk, and she’d be lying if she said walking didn’t lead to her making some good breakthroughs on her papers. 

Naturally, this walk was when she realized that she was a lesbian.

Something about the cool wind washing over her shoulders reminded her of the cool air that surrounded her as she walked home from the Cable Christmas party. She then remembers Jan, remembers what Jan said and what she said, and it hits her.

She had a total crush on Jan. 

It makes her laugh with fondness, but it doesn’t make her a lesbian.

That is, until she remembers Dana. That was a crush too. So was the sunglasses girl, so was Julie. So was the cute girl who volunteers at the library, and the actress on the soap opera that she watches with her friends. 

She thinks about Danny and Kyle, about decisions and posters and good first boyfriend stories, and she begins to laugh.

Of course, all this time, all these denials and boyfriends she didn’t want to kiss. After all this time, and she figures it out on a sidewalk in New York.

It’s pretty hilarious.

It makes her stop in the sidewalk and double over, and the other walkers merely walk around her, rolling their eyes and blaming college aged insanity. She can’t stop laughing. 

She is totally a lesbian, she thinks. And things are a bit clearer, a bit closer to peace. It’s not nirvana, but it’s recognition. It’s an explanation for the late nights, for the denim jacket and the tears. 

In that moment, she feels the veil lift from her eyes, and it makes her laugh even harder.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!! Comment if you can, I love reading them! Also, I do have a possible idea for the girlfriends she gets post-realization, so i am down for a sequel if there is enough interest.
> 
> Also, work title comes from the song "Beecharmer" by Nellie McKay and Cyndi Lauper.


End file.
